Address
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the Laurence L. & Thomas Winship / PEN New England Award (2012)
Address draws us into visible and invisible architectures, into acts of intimate and public address. These poems are concentrated, polyvocal, and sharply attentive to acts of representation; they take personally their politics and in the process reveal something about the way civic structures inhabit the imagination. Poisonous plants, witches, anthems, bees—beneath their surface, we glimpse the fragility of our founding, republican aspirations and witness a disintegrating landscape artfully transformed. If a poem can serve as a kind of astrolabe, measuring distances both cosmic and immediate, temporal and physical, it does so by imaginative, nonlinear means. Here, past and present engage in acts of mutual interrogation and critique, and within this dynamic Willis’s poetry is at once complexly authoritative and searching: “so begins our legislation.”
Check for the online reader’s companion at http://address.site.wesleyan.edu.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Anne Hutchinson, Sen, Katherine Harris, and a catalogue of the poisonous plants of America all find their way into this fifth book from Willis (Meteoric Flowers). Willis's fascination with forms originating outside of poetry "F.A.Q," "Flow Chart," "Blacklist" makes for a collection of great variety, with poems of various shapes, sizes and lengths. Some of the poems lose momentum in wordplay, but elsewhere Willis is her sharpest, funniest, and most original when she calls up a subject almost as old as poetry itself: witches. "The Witch" and "Blacklist" find Willis freeing herself to single, aphoristic lines that manage to comment on the heritage of woman-as-witch ("If her husband dies unexpectedly, she may refuse to marry his brother") while sending up our modern landscape as well ("In Hollywood the sky is made of tin"). Willis's address is unmistakable: these are poems that "tell you what you've done."
